The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry each planted a poppy.

Each poppy is made by hand. See the video at the Tower’s web site: http://poppies.hrp.org.uk/about-the-installation.

Poppies, of course, became symbols of the war because of the poem by Lt. Col. John McCrae, the Canadian physician who served as both a gunner and a medical officer though much of the war. During the Second Battle of Ypres, his battalion faced one of the first chemical attacks, but still held. Like so many soldiers, he avoided death by bullets, bombs, and gas only to die of pneumonia early in the last year of the war.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
          In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

Some critics think the poem falls apart in the third stanza, where the pastoral and elegiac mode with which the poem opens is replaced by “recruiting poster language.” They have a point. But the poppies worn today—like those planted at the Tower—ask us only to remember and mourn, not to fight. We are free to think that if the fallen are angry, it is not at those who refused to “take up the quarrel,” but with those who started it.

Mykonos is, I suppose, as lovely an isle as one could hope to see, if one's taste runs to the sun-bleached and Mediterranean. I myself prefer cool places where every living thing does not seem to be fighting a losing battle against drought. I'd prefer the heath of the Hebrides or, still better, the woods of the islands off the coast of Maine, even if that meant clouds and rain and more people appearing fully dressed.

I am not sure what men in Mykonos do now, besides tend bar. Once they must have fished, but there is no evidence of that beyond the fish in the tavernas, and they may have been flown in from the same factory ships that supply St. Louis and Milwaukee. Piracy no longer seems to be a career option, but I suspect it once was. Byron's Corsair would have found this a congenial spot. The piety business takes up a lot of land—there are votive churches everywhere, the fulfillment of vows by desperate sailors and their families. They are touching and beautiful in their own way, but I didn't see a single priest serving them, only the old ladies who lend skirts to the half-naked tourists of both sexes and make sure a euro has clinked in the box before a candle is lit. A few guys drive busses, and in off-peak times I'm sure white-washing a whole town employs many others, but mostly the local men are out of sight. Women staff the boutiques and do more than their share at the tavernas.

I’m told that male visitors can enjoy a gay scene, if Greek love is what they're interested in. For the heterosexual male tourist, however, there seem to be only two pastimes. One is standing outside the shops holding a lady's purse and packages while she shops for jewelry or trinkets or clothes in the over-priced boutiques. I saw retired construction workers and computer programmers and business executives from across the English-speaking world transformed into this sort of emasculated cigar store Indian and planted outside every shop in town. The other way a guy can spend his time ashore is to settle into a bar whose playlist features covers of lighter 60’s fare and get quietly or noisily drunk. Before you down more than a couple, you will have heard "Those Were the Days, My friend,” “Try to Remember the Kind of September,” and “The Fool on the Hill,” several times, along with, as instrumental interludes, several renditions of “Never on Sunday” and the theme from “Zorba the Greek.” 

Being a bachelor with a bad liver, and thus excluded from participation in even those activities, I didn't find Mykonos the most interesting place I have visited on my travels. I understand it was a pleasant simple island unfrequented much by outsiders until Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis brought the Jet Set here in the 1960’s. I'm sure it’s more fun for the truly rich, but I suspect that anywhere you go a part of the sad atmosphere of that era lingers. I was but a child in the 60’s, but I recall that the Kennedy era and its aftermath included not just tragedy (the assassinations, the wars), not just nobility (the civil rights struggle, the space program), not just childish rebellion (sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll), but also a brittle feeling that people were pretending to be having a great time but really were fending off a feeling of emptiness. That is part of what I always associate with the Rat Pack, with the part of “Camelot” that includes Marilyn Monroe at the President's birthday party, and the whole tawdry swinging, girl-watching, faux cool, medallions-and-turtleneck-where-my-tie-should-be atmosphere that pervaded the time as much as pot smoke and rock 'n' roll. 

I have no desire to revisit that era. I want to be where people wear their tuxes unironically or dress for a day of fishing. Or perhaps I'm just too old and too single to enjoy any place where you keep hearing a voice asking, “Is that lonely woman really me?” She’s not talking to me, but my only answer would be, “At least you can shop and giggle and swill the ouzo. I’m heading back to the ship.”

The sculpture is representative of much of the art of the first half of the 20th century, though not the sort of art that art historians most like to remember. It might be called art deco or some sort of realism, but you see it in New York, in London, here in Rome, and, in the extreme form called Socialist Realism (really Stalinist Triumphalism), in Moscow. Look at the buildings built for London Transport—look at Rockefeller Center.

That it chooses a mythological subject is not unusual in the high days of the mechanical age. Every American my age remembers the Texaco gas stations that displayed Pegasus as the symbol of movement and energy and progress. (We also recall the tune to “You can trust your car / To the man who wears the star— / The big bright Texaco star!” even though the guys in the sharp uniforms who pumped our gas and washed our windows and checked the oil are long gone, and we fill our own tanks and wipe our own windows and ignore the oil until the idiot light goes on and don’t really believe in progress any more.) Here is the pride of the mechanical age: man controls it all, and it takes him where he wants to go.

The train station at the Vatican speaks the same language:

The railroad is once again compared to flying horses, in this case horses that drew the chariot of fire that took Elijah away when his earthly ministry was ended. Whether heaven is just the right word for his destination is something I’ll leave to the Old Testament scholars, but that is where we Christians know he was headed. He is not the only or the most important person who arrived there along with his most important piece of luggage, his body, but he and Enoch may be the only ones who didn’t have to make do without it for a time. Both Christ and (according to the doctrine of the Dormition / Assumption) Blessed Virgin Mary had to entrust theirs to that annoying porter or customs inspector Death before getting them back.

The difference between the two images is in who is controlling what. At the Stazione Ostiense, we have Bellerophon bridling Pegasus with the bridle given him by Athena. It is clearly a celebration of the power of man—the Bridle given by the goddess of wisdom in this context can only represent science and engineering and man’s mastery over nature. (Bellerophon’s attempt to join the gods on Olympus and his precipitous fall from the back of his wingéd mount is a part of the story that would not reassure those boarding the train that they would reach their destination, so I am not surprised that there is no companion frieze depicting it.)

At the Vatican train station, the horses are unbridled. That is not because they are uncontrolled, but because their driver needs no reins. That driver is Lord himself, who appears only through the movement of his creatures. The horses taking Elijah to his destination are already on the move—and they need no wings—the wingéd angel acts more like a conductor than a charioteer, and he does not so much direct the chariot as ask the passenger to look forward, not back. Elijah himself is still pronouncing some sort of blessing on Elisha, even as the wheels turn and his mantle falls from his shoulder to be clutched by his successor.

If the public station says, “Man now has the power to go wherever he pleases whenever he likes,” the Vatican station says, “In all your travels, remember your final destination, and that you may be called there when you least expect it, leaving all your power behind.” I am afraid I have lost my early faith in what the public station says; the Vatican station’s message seems ever truer.

I was glad to be around so many people who had come to pay their respects even early on a cold Saturday morning. They had almost all made their way to the site as something more than tourists, and there was a natural reverence among them that didn’t need to be reinforced by calls for quiet and decorum. Many were clearly moved, especially by the tree that is said to have survived the attack and has been tended and replanted to take its place in the urban forest that will grow from the many saplings planted on the plaza. But the monument itself seemed neither comforting nor inspiring.

The two waterworks are not fountains or pools, both of which could suggest new life. Nothing bursts upward, and the cascades of water are never live-giving or fructifying. Everything flows downhill and winds up lost in what are really nothing more than two massive drains.

If the designers’ purpose was to show nothing but dead loss, their work succeeds. Looking over the names to the black orifice below, one can hardly think anything but, “All those lives down the drain.” While I cannot say that view of the events of 9/11 is untrue, I cannot see why anyone would want to embody it in a huge and expensive monument.

I know some of the reasons that the monument has taken this form. The families of the victims—or many of them—objected to the site being returned to productive use. For them, it was not just the scene of the crime, but the tomb of those they had lost, since the bodies had been vaporized in the fires or annealed into the rumble. Many traditional forms of monument would be impossible, because any specific religious iconography would be inappropriate, because no higher cause was furthered by the calamity, and because, aside from the policemen, firemen, and other public safety officers, few of those memorialized sacrificed their lives, and there was thus no place for the laurels that mark the heroic fallen.

Still, I am saddened that it was decided to mark the site with these emblems of pure loss. In cemeteries across the country I have seen monuments to people who died equally senseless, meaningless deaths, though never ones tinged with so much human malice. The victims of riverboat explosions or cholera epidemics are usually marked by something like an obelisk. Pointing skyward, those columns suggest hope. Do we now have a shared culture that cannot agree even to hope for, if not a life to come, a better life for others? That the “Survivor Tree” has become an important part of the site suggests we can.

I wish a monument embodying hope and resolve had been created for the dead of 9/ll—and I wish the monument had not been created on so vast a scale and that it had not made the site unusable. A place where people died going about the daily business of life should have been returned to its former uses, not left as two lifeless cavities. Nations that dwell on their defeats are never happy ones—as anyone who has met an Irishman still refighting the Battle of the Boyne or a Serb still breathing vengeance over that awful day on the Field of Blackbirds knows. We have left two open wounds running forever in our greatest city: I am not sure that will turn out to be healthy for our country.

But whatever a critic may say, the site will be used, and that use will make it sacred. I uncovered my head and prayed for the souls of all who died that day as I watched the water drain into the void. Beside me, a few people searched for specific names, and many craned their necks to see how the new towers were progressing. (Slowly, slowly!) Neither the ordinary people who suffered a senseless crime nor the heroes who laid down their lives for others will be forgotten. And that matters more than architecture.

North American College, February 18, 2012